Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Reviews

March 30, 2022

Film noir and the movie-made American male

Recently I spoke at Hillsdale College on film noir as part of a program that introduced audiences to four of the most impressive movies in the genre that defined the tough detective in America and the less popular type of doomed romantic. Continue Reading...
March 24, 2022

Volodymyr Zelensky is the Servant of the People

Three Ukrainian oligarchs, a shadow Triumvirate as it were, stand on a balcony overlooking a gorgeous town square. An election for president is imminent and they’re tired of wasting millions on backing their own candidates and then millions more on ruining those candidates’ rivals. Continue Reading...
March 18, 2022

A Dark Knight of the soul

The Batman plunges us straight into the middle of a crisis of faith. Gone is Bale’s confident and charismatic playboy. Robert Pattinson’s Batman hasn’t slept for a week. He journals, sulks, and obsesses over details. Continue Reading...
March 14, 2022

Who’s writing Vladimir Putin’s Animal Farm?

It’s 1934 and Gareth Jones (James Norton), journalist and foreign adviser to British prime minister Lloyd George, is trying to convince a room full of stuffed shirts with fancy government titles that Adolf Hitler is looking to wage war in Europe, to build a thousand-year Reich. Continue Reading...
March 10, 2022

The Batman is a modern noir mess

The story begins on Halloween, almost exactly 20 years after the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne. A new killer—an internet sensation, as it turns out—is on the loose, violently ridding Gotham City of its excesses. Continue Reading...
March 02, 2022

Midnight Mass: There is no feast on a fast

Near the beginning of the Netflix series Midnight Mass, released in late 2021, an Ash Wednesday service is faithfully shown, complete with a young priest’s effective and moving sermon, explaining the ashes as “a smudge of death, of ash, of sin—for repentance—because of where this is all heading, which is Easter. Continue Reading...